I always wanted to be more organized and apparently I am not alone.
Almost everybody has this clutter problem. In the offline world there was only one way for order in chaos. One has to be disciplined and almost fanatical about organization as things can get out of order easily. Remember the second law of thermodynamics: it takes high energy to maintain order or equilibrium. Grandma’s rule “a place for everything and everything in its place” is the mantra here.
A single broken-window could destroy all the past hard work. For example, in my case, all it takes for mail to start accumulating is to leave a single mail on our breakfast table. Within a week the clutter would be breathing and talking like a Pixar character. It does get incredibly overwhelming.
Yet, we accumulate¹ more paper and digital clutter and much of our critical personal information is trapped in this clutter.
The Economist, when talking about the curse of untidiness, says this:
The clutter industry feeds the addiction. Self-storage has been the fastest-growing part of America’s commercial-property business in the past 30 years. There are now almost seven square feet of self-storage for every American. Paying more to store something than it is worth may seem doubly irrational. … Since the urge to accumulate stuff is limitless, so is the scope for selling people stuff to keep it in.
Is there a better way? Can you easily find things without being organized?
Not too long ago, I remember spending hours organizing my Hotmail/Yahoo email folders. Outlook was even more of a pain. A single busy week could undo all the time you have spent trying to get control of your inbox. Even if I had a semblance of order in my inbox and folders, I never won the battle with my sent mail.
It took GMail and Copernic/Google Desktop to help us solve the organization problem. They did so not with Outlook/Hotmail-esque Folders, but with indexing, labeling and search.
David Weinberger’s 2007 book “Everything is Miscellaneous“ talks in detail about “the New Order of Order”.
OfficeDrop is exactly that. We do not sell bins, shelves, totes, carts, trunks, baskets, crates and drawers. Yet we help you become better organized by searching to find.
Check out how OfficeDrop works and Prasad’s post on how we help you get organized. Try OfficeDrop and find it out yourself.
¹Why we accumulate is an interesting topic and deserves a separate post.
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